


the flowers of london have gone

by hiraethmemories



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, F/F, Help, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mysticism, Strained Relationships, Subway Trips?, i don't know if i'm able to write happy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:54:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26368282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiraethmemories/pseuds/hiraethmemories
Summary: They're trudging through the river, the wet ingrained in their very souls when Catra asks the question. "Why help me?"Her footfalls slow and the water suddenly feels paradoxically stagnant. Whenever possible, Adora is careful not to push too hard when she questions or answers. So she thinks. And thinks.Her response never comes. The roof of her mouth tastes like a sour joke, like talc.The both of them know the answer as much as she doesn't.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	the flowers of london have gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's been on an dystopia novel binge recently? I've had this introduction collecting dust for about a month now, so I decided to finally post it somewhere. The story's been plotted out, the notes have been taken, the procrastination made, but I'm just slow on the uptake. 
> 
> Future chapters should be decently longer.

Grip the bolt. Pull back, flip up. Take shell, seat in chamber, rush bolt back. Slide down, fire. Repeat ad infinitum.

A thing to understand about the weapon: It is not hers. An inspection reveals that it’s a victim of piecemeal development, parts seemingly added and removed at random. At its core, it’s a bolt-action rifle, some poor Winchester or Remington that’s been torn apart then reassembled then torn apart again. The patchwork body it’s built in is coated in pockmark-like welds.

She wipes the growing condensation off her mask, smearing her glove on her pant leg. _Deep breaths, remember?_ To even a gulp of air, she has to suck in as hard as possible. The filters bump against the weapon softly as she moves her head back to aim.

Below her - far below her, thankfully - is her target. Among the frozen cars and icicle-laden awnings, a solitary deer weaves its way through the eerie silence. Their body is thin but strong, brown fur pulled taut over wiry muscles. Heavily-built for a doe. It’s life-changing money.

Traders would go through hell, she thinks, and even further for it. Animal hide’s amazing for grips, clothing, warmth, and the softer the better. She could sell the bones to a tent-pharmacy, maybe make charms for the superstitious. But the meat is the key. People can live off of blanched pigs and gamy mushrooms, but everyone misses a meal. A cut of shoulder could buy her water for a year. Tenderloin would give her a way out.

She counts seven bullets altogether, six lying snug in a pouch at her hip. Theoretically, she could miss six times in a row and come out on top. That thought comes with problems; two, specifically. In the case where she misses several times, it’ll have already escaped or hidden from the noise. Somewhere in her backpack is a makeshift suppressor (pvc pipes and steel wool) but she’s not fully trusting of the idea that it holds together that long. In the case that it hasn’t run and she pierces it with the final shot, she’s out of bullets.

Running out of bullets is a considerably bad fate.

Deciding to lie flat instead of crouch, she docks her weapon on the roof’s edge, breath bated. Burnt metal attaches a laser pointer at the tip of the rifle, bright red, cheap, and half-broken, which she tries to get to line up with the deer. A split ring dangles from the back, denoting the status of “gas station souvenir”. This known, she makes to draw the dot.

Account for velocity and wind. Visualize the bullet’s drop rate. She squeezes down on the toothpick of a trigger. The air in front of her screams.

The gun roars back so hard that if her grip was a pascal less, it would’ve gone cascading down to the cracked sidewalks. It shakes her spine, travels all the way down to rumble in her toes, and takes the tram back up to chatter her teeth. But when she pulls the scope down, she gives more of a grimace than a grin. She didn’t hit her target - but it landed. 

The doe, more than anything looks confused, bewildered even, stumbling an awkward gait. It gives a few cursory glances to its surroundings, then luridly paws at the ground. The pressure compacts the blood into the snow. Despite its newfound lack of a snout, it attempts to give it a good once over with it’s nose.

Quickly, she depresses another shell into the chamber, fumbling with the spent bullet until pocketing it. She has four- maybe five seconds. Any longer and she might as well kiss her chances goodbye. She clicks the laser pointer off. Aim for the breast.

Her face is sweltering in its containment, a traitor to the frozen elements. Sweat promises to cloud her vision, first tickling at the edges of her eyes, then drizzling down the sides, irritating her sclera, soon encroaching on the center, closing like that of a supervillain’s island entrance and, channeling the kind of morbid focus that she’s only ever seen in the subway guards - the ones who stare into the dark and hope to whatever deity they pray to that there are no rats today - she breathes hard and succinct, and curses at herself, and lets the metal fly. Her ears ring. Five bullets left.

She hit it. _Christ on a bike, she hit it._

And it is here, liquid effort stained on her forehead, clumping together blonde hair to make brownish stalactites of keratin, celebrations of victory almost upon her, a kind of strangled cry escapes her mouth. There’s a weight on her back, then more, suddenly reversing to yank her upright and back. “You’ve got about ten seconds to explain why _I_ ,” a voice says, a thin line of metal pressed against her collarbone for emphasis, “Shouldn’t throw you clear off this roof.”

The deer’s on the ground, literally deathly still save for the errant twitch of life. Time’s running out. “No. No, you don’t understand,” she responds. There’s a wet itch in her voice, soft but audible, and she wishes there wasn’t. “I need to get down there. Like, right n-”

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up, please.” The blade digs just a little deeper, exposing a crest of blood in the exposed skin. “I leave for a few days and I come back to some random chick in my dead friend’s fort, using my dead friend’s stuff, and attracting those… those _things_ to my dead friend’s body. I think I’m entitled to a few answers. Your opinion?”

A pang of regret implodes in her chest, a few inches down from the cut. “Oh my god. Shit, I suck.” 

“Yeah, well… it’s not like it doesn’t happen,” says her mystery assailant, indignantly to boast. But their hold on her loosens a bit and they do as well, adding, “But thanks. For a thief, you’re considerate. All th’ same, doesn’t explain how you got here.”

The lull in the conversation doesn’t hold long, wearing thin as quickly as cheap paracord. Her eyes won’t - can’t - stray far from the animal. “Yes. I mean thanks. No?” It’s probably going to fester or one of those leathery monsters is going to drag it away and she’ll have to stay here longer, stuck in a concrete jungle of radiation that sinks a little deeper every day - rot - and now, inexplicably, she thinks of flowers. Of forget-me-nots, of those blue-yellow flowers in troves, overflowing from a decrepit window, pouring like little urban waterfalls. Now. “Sorry,” she says again, which she means.

“Mhm. You sh-”

With that, she stamps her boot down on their foot and there’s an ugly rattle of metal from the floor. They screech. “Asshole!”

Confusion to her advantage, she spins on her heel into a semi-crouch, grabbing them by the wrist. For a millisecond she’s caught confused by its thinness, but she pushes the thought away, zips her other hand to their waist, and puts her whole body into barreling forward.

They go down hard, hitting the ground with an uncomfortable thump. _Don’t look. Don’t._ Vaguely, she hears a throaty cough come stabbing out of them. 

She feels only the ghosts of a set of fingers on her ankle when she is abruptly jerked flat on her stomach. Her right elbow hits first, coat-covered turtleneck not doing much to shield her nerves. Split-second decision, she rolls out of the way of whatever’s coming. Scratch that, she attempts to, but her attacker straddles her halfway through, staring face-to-face with her.

Girl. That’s the first thought that enters her head; their frame shows through their bulk of clothing. She’s got syrup-brown, edging on hickory, hair that erupts out of a fat red beanie, trailing down in spikes to rest beneath her shoulders. Anything else that could be observed is hidden by a metaphorical windshield plastered on her face. “Of course! Goddamn _common courtesy_ will get you killed up here!” Just out of her view, they snatch the knife.

Adora Gray does not have a problem killing animals. In situations like those, there are obvious rights and wrongs. For example, if a bear’s attacking you, it’s either hungry or believes that you’re trying to take its territory. You can respond by running or you respond by challenging it back. One less bear won’t kill an ecosystem.

She throws her knees to the right. The girl comes half-off, but locks a leg with her, inertia twisting the both of their positions.

Hypocritically, there is one animal Adora can’t bring herself to do anything about. Sharks eat one another in the womb, vying for dominance before a drop of water flows through their lungs. Jackals are cunning. They’ll chew a sick member of their posse into pieces without hesitation. A Haddock will swim upriver just to eat someone else’s eggs.

The back of her head knocks into the roof parapet and all she can hear and think is ow. She blindly palms around for something, anything, to gain an upper hand with. The girl rustles at her feet.

It’s humans that won’t let her put them down. Humans, who are so good at inventing ways to end others, beings who often take joy in that fact, that only make her mind think about the good they do. It’s a thoroughly self-disliked ideology.

Her fingers find purchase in the discarded rifle, skimming off of it repeatedly before locking around the barrel. For a brief second, her body scoots back, escaping her attacker, but her brain remembers the ledge and knocks Adora to the side. The gun’s stock scrapes across the ground, screeches. The girl lunges.

Adora, getting in only half an admonishment to her too-thick gloves, latches onto the rifle, a flimsy barricade that lasts seconds at most against the full weight of a human. And then - again - they are grappling. The girl takes the gun, then Adora, then the girl again, and then Adora has knocked them on their back and smashed in their mask visor and she is hammering, hammering at them and she is silently, maybe not-so silently screaming.

It is eerily-quiet.

When she stands and the even further bent and broken weapon falls from her hands, she can’t be certain if her face is wet from tears or sweat. At this point, it likely doesn’t matter.

She picks up her backpack and tucks whatever spare materials she finds lying around into spare pockets. Her hands are shaking. In all, she finds three ration bars, half of a nine-iron golf club, and a few loose d-volt batteries and she almost drops each one. Her eyes continue to automatically snap back at the girl.

They’re staring at Adora. On the ground, chest inanimate, they are staring. 

She walks- edges over to them. Their filters aren’t smashed and Adora doesn’t know how long it’ll take her to drag back the deer. She wishes it was a debate on what to do.

There's an inherent feeling that there's something grimy about how she undoes the straps of the mask, squeezing the pinch-buckles to a satisfying snap. Even after undoing the tightening, it takes a bit of pressure to pull of from how sticky it wants to be.

A familiar face greets her.

-

Idly striking the magnesium rod, Adora’s thoughts naturally replay the moment over and over again.

They’re at the Central observatory, seventeen and ready for anything - which leads them to sneak into it. For as much as they forbade them from entering it, no one ever clearly explained why. The only thing stopping people from going in was this “shield” of half-baked excuses glued together with paranoia, a constantly expanding cycle of scare tactics.

It was a strange building in the sense that everyone agreed that it was strange. There was nothing normal about it, not from the blank door that you entered through, eighty feet down from any fresh air, to the creaking noises Kyle swears he heard whenever he passed by it. She’d made fun of him for this. Adora didn’t stop her.

When they were inevitably inside of it, her opinion didn’t change. The emotion inside of the building was palpable, thick enough that a fire ax wouldn’t reliably chop through it. Green, lesion-like sores that looked deeper than the walls they grew on were everywhere, spreading like wildfire, like disease, and the floor was an infection in every sense of the word. 

The inside was circular, which she’d added to the reasons it was strange. The building was circular. Someone fifty, a hundred years ago - maybe more - had thought that it would be good design to make it that way. _How would someone go about making a circular building?_ she had thought. It's still a mystery to this day.

But they’re in the Central and, even though there are disgusting growths on anything not bolted down, the both of them are mesmerized. The roof of the building is translucent, “Glass,” says the living lion mane, which Adora isn’t confident about, but agrees with nonetheless. The sky is overcast and a depressive black, stereotypical, and there is also a crack. Weak moonlight, possibly starlight, drips from it, weak like its battery was almost dead, but it is a special magic. Magic is a treacherous thing. A beautiful treachery. It overruled their judgement, hid it from them.

Adora lets her lips drift into a dim frown. It’s a bygone era now. With all the Horde’s superstitions, they’ve probably boarded up the door and thrown out all the hammers.

Sparks finally manage to catch onto the newspaper fuse, spreading molasses slow to the fuel gel. The only thing left to do is wait for the water to heat. Adora pops a butterscotch in her mouth, neatly folding the wrapper into a dense square.

Soon, the candy has withered away and the water’s come to a rolling boil. In goes the carefully-portioned rice, soft becomes the flame. She sits the lid into the opening and opens the vents wider collapsing into a camping chair to rest. Her local surroundings are taken up by rusty lockers and ancient electronic equipment, sentimental knickknacks, and micro-managed supplies and it's enjoyable. It’s as cozy as a dead man’s workplace probably ever could be.

Her luck should be immeasurable to have found this place, and even more so to have found it in such decent condition. The subways were built vicariously through corporate sponsors and government funds, often clashing against each other as violently as a train derailment. Somebody in the upper crust of the courthouse wanted a tunnel under 6th Street, the bigwigs in the 1% wanted to bore a hole perpendicular to it. 

Near every little bit of Etheria’s underground was designed in that way, retroactively creating perfect hiding holes and pitstops for would-be adventurers. Unfinished service tunnels and empty maintenance rooms make up the majority of private housing and empty railway cars fill the position of communal homes. Be that as it may, a private item is usually an expensive one, and a home under that adjective isn’t exempt. Legally, acquiring one of those would be like winning the lottery and Adora, loathe to admit it, hasn’t been wholly following the jurisdiction of the local law.

Now that she’s thinking about it, she’s not entirely sure that she even knows the local law. Yes, she knew the Horde’s laws: don’t ask stupid questions, outsiders are dangerous, etcetera, etcetera. They were strict, but they kept people safe and happy (to a point). The stations around her? Complete and total mystery.

Her ignorance got so bad one time, the milit-

Somewhere, a door handle jiggles.

She scrambles. The closest object turns out to be a large red tennis racket, aluminum casing made rusty and jagged from age, so that’s what she arms herself with. Creeping from her seat, she practically tip-toes to the entryway corner, the rough and tumble concrete scraping through her undershirt. She’s prepared for this.

“Damnit,” comes a strained, unnervingly memorable voice.

Not this. She lays her weapon down. God, she's been dreading this.

Adora steps out into the hallway.

“Hi, uh, Catra.”

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoyable? Please, constructively beat the shit out of my writing skills so I can improve.
> 
> Expect updates about once a month due to my on-again, off-again relationship with doing school work. 
> 
> Here's a tonal playlist I made for this a while back:  
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2mFzw6CYravRvXT80Utdac?si=Mfuy_yVvRuqplI67BaEakg


End file.
